Obama's group therapy

Of course, his aides would never state it so crudely. But that’s the unmistakable aim of their political strategy of the past two months.

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The Obama campaign spent weeks playing up the contraception fight and pushing legislation to guarantee women equal pay for equal work — and then crowing about how women were fleeing the GOP. Obama got pushed into backing gay marriage more quickly than he wanted — but once he did, the campaign milked it for days to try to make Romney look like a throwback. The drumbeat on more affordable student loans has been constant. And now, the president is trying to drive a wedge between Romney and Hispanic voters with a sustained push to soften U.S. deportation policy.

To many Republicans, the president’s strategy is very crass — and potentially very effective. The threat of being marginalized as an aging, almost all-white, mostly male party is real and worth fretting about, they say.

“You’ve got opportunity if the Republicans decide that it’s OK to look outside the country club for some votes,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster whose past clients included Jeb Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. “But you’re going to lose another close election if you focus only on getting out your base when your base is shrinking.”

The opening weeks of the general election have made plain the starkly different political calculations by Obama and Romney. The Republican nominee is trying to make the election about one big, overarching issue: blaming Obama for a wobbly economy and failed agenda. Given his strengths and weaknesses as a candidate, this is a no-brainer approach for Romney right now.

Obama, on the other hand, is trying to make it about a bunch of issues, often ones near and dear to specific states, or even demographic groups. Obama strategists see this election as a block-by-block knife fight, to be fought in fewer than a dozen states and likely decided by very slim margins. They think it’s a fool’s errand to worry about press panting over Bill Clinton or bad national polls. Instead, they obsess about Hispanics in Colorado, young voters in Ohio and swing voters in the Virginia suburbs (socially liberal or libertarian, fiscally moderate).

“This isn’t 2008,” a top Obama campaign adviser said. “We just think people are looking at the race the wrong way.” The right way, according to the adviser: “[T]he expansion of the electorate is our base. It’s African-Americans, Hispanics, young people and women.”

To concentrate its efforts to win over these voters, Obama for America has a sophisticated campaign-within-the-campaign, Operation Vote, focusing on specific swing and Democratic base groups, including women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, youth, seniors, and gays and lesbians, along with veterans and military families. There are separate structures for each of those groups in key states to amp up turnout and persuasion, including voter registration and “neighborhood team model organizing” that takes activities down to the grass-roots level.

Republicans, meanwhile, are under no illusion they can keep up with Obama among these groups, or win a majority of gays, young people, women or Hispanics. But it’s the latter two groups that have them most unnerved — knowing that they likely hold the key to who wins the White House.

Let’s start with Hispanics. The truth about politics is that Republicans — regardless of the nominee — are a mostly white party, and have been for decades. They get roughly 87 percent of their votes from whites — and rarely elect minority candidates at the national level. Right now, there are only two black and eight Hispanic Republicans in all of Congress. There are more than 270 whites.

Yet the proportion of white voters in the U.S. electorate slid from 88 percent in 1976 to 74 percent in 2008 while total minority groups more than doubled from 12 percent to 26 percent, according to a study of exit polls by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who is president of North Star Opinion Research and a founder of the GOP research group Resurgent Republic.